DNA evidence shows the Soviets covered up an anthrax accident that killed dozens

The
US intelligence community had long suspected the Soviet scientists were
working on anthrax as a biological weapon, so the news of an outbreak
of the disease in April of 1979 certainly looked like an accidental
weapon release. A total of 66 people died in the city of Sverdlovsk (now
renamed Yekaterinburg) and many more fell ill. The Russians swore at
the time this was a natural occurrence caused by sick cattle, and that
story held up for years. Now, long after the true cause of the outbreak
was revealed, scientists have been able to perform DNA analysis on the deadly bacterial strain.

News reports in
1979 frequently speculated that the deaths were a result of accidental
or intentional infection of the population with a weaponized strain of
anthrax. If the Soviets were good at anything, it was sticking to a
story. Nearly a decade after the outbreak, a team of Russian scientists
came to a conference in at the National Academy of Sciences to present
evidence that the Sverdlovsk outbreak was merely the result of humans
consuming meat from animals that had contracted anthrax. It’s not
impossible—anthrax bacteria
are found in soil, and animals do sometimes become infected — though no
previous outbreak had ever killed so many people via this vector.

The official
explanation might have held up indefinitely if not for Harvard biologist
Matthew Meselson, who led a team to investigate the outbreak in 1992,
following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet doctors had done
autopsies on the victims of the outbreak, and it turns out those samples
survived. The medical personnel in Sverdlovsk had hidden the original
tissue samples in the local hospital’s pathology museum in order to
prevent the KGB from confiscating them. From viewing the original
materials, Meselson’s team knew without a doubt they were looking at
inhalation anthrax, not ingestion anthrax as the Russians originally
claimed. A former Soviet scientist later came forward to confirm the
anthrax spores were released in 1979 due to a faulty air filter in the
Sverdlovsk military installation.

Anthrax has been researched as a bioweapon not only because of its deadliness, but because the Bacillus anthracis
bacterium forms spores (above). These are compact capsules bacteria
generate to survive harsh conditions. It’s a bit like hibernation. When
conditions improve, the spore germinates and becomes an active bacteria
again. This makes anthrax very easy to transport and distribute as a
weapon.DNA
testing was still in its infancy in 1992 when the deception was
uncovered, still everyone wondered if the Soviet anthrax strain was
truly weaponized. Could an accidental release of unmodified anthrax kill
dozens of people? Preliminary testing done in 1996 revealed little, but
more recent testing on samples from Sverdlovsk allowed for a full
analysis of the 1979 strain.

Microbiologist Paul Keim reports that the full sequence of Bacillus anthracis
from Sverdlovsk is a very close match for unmodified anthrax strains.
If the Sverdlovsk lab was trying to modify anthrax, they were not
successful at it. It didn’t take a highly modified bioweapon to kill
those 66 people, so how much worse could it have been with a weaponized
strain?